NEW DELHI, Mar 24: Recognising that the contribution of youth was essential to invigorate the farm sector, Union Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Minister Radha Mohan Singh on Saturday called upon young agriculture entrepreneurs to utilise their digital knowledge for imparting technological information to farmers.
Speaking at AgriVision 2018 National Agriculture Students Conference here, Mr Singh called upon youth to help government achieve the goal of doubling farmers’ income by 2022.
To attract talent in higher education, Rs 1,100 crore had been sanctioned for Indian Council of Agriculture Research’s ambitious National Agricultural Higher Education Project (NAHEP), he said.
The project will be financed on 50:50 cost sharing basis between the World Bank and the Central Government. New guidelines for accreditation of agricultural universities had been prepared and 63 agricultural universities had already been granted accreditation, he added.
The Minister informed the meeting that an agricultural education portal had been launched by the ICAR for rural youth. Through this portal, information related to education, announcements, programmes and e-learning curriculum from all the agricultural universities of the country were being made available to students.
Agrinnovate India, a platform of ICAR, provides an interface to entrepreneurs. They could use this for the transfer of technology for commercialisation and also encourage innovation and capacity-driven agricultural development, he said.
He said amendments had been made in the existing curriculum of veterinary education with an aim to make it world-class. Besides, the number of veterinary colleges had been increased and more seats had been added in colleges to meet the shortage of trained veterinarians.
He further informed that 130 training programmes were started at 32 state agricultural universities in organic farming and cow-based economic development by ICAR under the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Unnat Krishi Shiksha Scheme.
For this purpose, 100 centres had been identified with a budgetary provision of Rs 5.35 crore. (UNI)
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